Changing Focus

For most of this century, managing Kodak required little more than making sure the film-making machines ran day and night. But years of easy success fostered complacency, bureaucracy, and overspending. By the late eighties, Kodak had lost its edge. Threatened by Fuji and other competitors and plagued with debt from ill-conceived diversification attempts, it became one of the first major U.S. businesses to seek salvation through downsizing, slashing thousands of jobs. Later, a new CEO, George Fisher, was wooed from Motorola with a huge, controversial contract to lead a last-ditch turn-around…